Il presente della relazione. Dialogo, differenze, società-mondo

Abstract

The article offers some reflections on the problems and opportunities that the practice of dialogue encounters in present times, inscribed within the whole human history. These times are considered to be the troubled beginning of a new societal form, the world-society, understood, with Morin, as a new community of destiny. Three notions are discussed, which are considered able to highlight the most challenging questions: heterogeneity, simultaneity and fall of the hierarchy. It is assumed, with Girard, that human social interactions have al-ways been ruled by hierarchies unanimously believed as sacred, to say extra-human, primarily based on the evolutionary efficacy of the sacrificial device. It is hypothesized that with the affirmation of the narratives that reveal the innocence of the expiatory victim (especially the Gospels), a radical weakening of the hierarchy has begun which has led from the vertical regulation of social interactions to the unprecedented challenge of more direct and horizontal regulations. With modernism and then with the recent globalization marked by the development of hyper-speedy communication technologies, this process has experienced a dramatic acceleration, with predominantly individualistic and destructive results. It is suggested that different outcomes, capable of favoring positive processes of subjectivation, require the promotion of an ecological feeling (in the sense of Bateson) of relational participation in the beginning world-society.